Shircy, who earlier served as a principal and sessions judge, and Joseph, who was a district judge, joined the High Court from the bench. Asha and Sivaraman were government pleaders and came from the bar.

The latest appointment has taken the percentage of women judges in the Kerala High Court to 10.5% but this is still lower than their percentage in other High Courts – 25.6% in Delhi, 15.2% in Punjab and Haryana, and 12.5% in Bombay.

“In 2014, I was the only woman judge in the Kerala High Court,” said Asha. “The next year, we got two more. And now with Shircy’s appointment, the representation of women has increased to four.”

However, Asha said it should not have taken such a long time to appoint more women to the higher judiciary.

She added, “There is no dearth of efficient women judges in Kerala. At present, women’s representation in the lower judiciary is 28.6%. So I am confident that the number of women judges will increase in future.”

While women judges struggle to make it to the higher judiciary, some have a more difficult time than others. Sivaraman said women from the bar faced more difficulties to become judges compared to their counterparts from the bench.

“Women judges in the lower courts can hope to become judges in the higher courts, but those from the bar have to stay in the demanding profession for long to make the cut,” she said.

Sivaraman said the legal profession should be made more attractive for women, and suggested that providing crèches and offering financial support to set up their own offices would help.

She added, “Many competent women have been overlooked for appointment as judges for different reasons. I think the number of women judges would increase if the system provided a level playing field in the selection process.”

Equal opportunity

Retired judge Fathima Beevi – who was the first woman to be appointed a judge in the Supreme Court – said she wanted to see more women in the higher judiciary. “It is good to know the Kerala High Court now has four sitting women judges, but I don’t think it is a big number,” she said. “The Supreme Court should appoint more women judges.”

Beevi agreed with Asha’s contention that there was no dearth of competent women judges in the state. “The selection panel should concentrate only on merit to pick the right candidates,” she said. “If we wish to see more women opt for the legal profession, then they should not face discrimination during the selection of judges.”

The Supreme Court Women Lawyers Association has raised the issue of women's representation with the apex court. It has said that the collegium – a body of senior Supreme Court judges in change of appointments to the higher judiciary – must shed its gender bias in recommending the names of advocates for appointment as judges of the apex court.

“There are just 62 women judges compared to 611 male judges in High Courts in the entire country,” said Prerna Kumari, general secretary of the lawyers’ group.

According to a media report that appeared late last year, nine of the 24 state High Courts did not have a single woman judge while three had only one woman judge. In the Supreme Court, it added, Justice R Banumathi was the sole woman among 29 judges.

Kumari hoped other High Courts in India would take a cue from Kerala and appoint more women judges. She said, “There should be greater representation of women judges in our legal system. And there should be a balance between bar and bench while selecting the judges.”

Pointing out that there was a spike in the number of women lawyers in the lower and higher judiciary, and that many of them were associating themselves with central judicial panels or working as amici curiae, she hoped the number of women judges would rise too.

Tracing the formation of Al Qaeda and its path to 9/11

A new show looks at some of the crucial moments leading up to the attack.

“The end of the world war had bought America victory but not security” - this quote from Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer-Prize winning book, ‘The Looming Tower’, gives a sense of the growing threat to America from Al Qaeda and the series of events that led to 9/11. Based on extensive interviews, including with Bin Laden’s best friend in college and the former White House counterterrorism chief, ‘The Looming Tower’ provides an intimate perspective of the 9/11 attack.

Lawrence Wright chronicles the formative years of Al Qaeda, giving an insight in to Bin Laden’s war against America. The book covers in detail, the radicalisation of Osama Bin Laden and his association with Ayman Al Zawahri, an Egyptian doctor who preached that only violence could change history. In an interview with Amazon, Wright shared, “I talked to 600-something people, but many of those people I talked to again and again for a period of five years, some of them dozens of times.” Wright’s book was selected by TIME as one of the all-time 100 best nonfiction books for its “thoroughly researched and incisively written” account of the road to 9/11 and is considered an essential read for understanding Islam’s war on the West as it developed in the Middle East.

‘The Looming Tower’ also dwells on the response of key US officials to the rising Al Qaeda threat, particularly exploring the turf wars between the FBI and the CIA. This has now been dramatized in a 10-part mini-series of the same name. Adapted by Dan Futterman (of Foxcatcher fame), the series mainly focuses on the hostilities between the FBI and the CIA. Some major characters are based on real people - such as John O’ Neill (FBI’s foul-mouthed counterterrorism chief played by Jeff Daniels) and Ali Soufan (O’ Neill’s Arabic-speaking mentee who successfully interrogated captured Islamic terrorists after 9/11, played by Tahar Rahim). Some are composite characters, such as Martin Schmidt (O’Neill’s CIA counterpart, played by Peter Sarsgaard).

The series, most crucially, captures just how close US intelligence agencies had come to foiling Al Qaeda’s plans, just to come up short due to internal turf wars. It follows the FBI and the CIA as they independently follow intelligence leads in the crises leading up to 9/11 – the US Embassy bombings in East Africa and the attack on US warship USS Cole in Yemen – but fail to update each other. The most glaring example is of how the CIA withheld critical information – Al Qaeda operatives being hunted by the FBI had entered the United States - under the misguided notion that the CIA was the only government agency authorised to deal with terrorism threats.

The depth of information in the book has translated into a realistic recreation of the pre-9/11 years on screen. The drama is even interspersed with actual footage from the 9/11 conspiracy, attack and the 2004 Commission Hearing, linking together the myriad developments leading up to 9/11 with chilling hindsight. Watch the trailer of this gripping show below.

Play

The Looming Tower is available for streaming on Amazon Prime Video, along with a host of Amazon originals and popular movies and TV shows. To enjoy unlimited ad free streaming anytime, anywhere, subscribe to Amazon Prime Video.

This article was produced by the Scroll marketing team on behalf of Amazon Prime Video and not by the Scroll editorial team.